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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

It has been so long since I have
done a book review I’m not sure if I remember how.For November we were suppose to read two books,
“A Discovery of Witches” by Deborah Harkness and “A Graveyard Book” by Neil
Gaiman.I came down with that nasty cold
that had been going around so I was only able to finish one of the books before
the meeting; this was “A Discovery of Witches.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
While we have a few familiar elements, such as witches and vampires, it is a new
take on these beings. We also have another class of beings in this book, and they
are the daemons.For millennium these
three types of being have worked hard to hide themselves from humans.The two main characters are Diana Bishop, a
historian and a witch, and Matthew Clairmont who happens to be a scientist as
well as a vampire.Diana who is doing
research on alchemy asks for a book from the Bodleian Library.It is most commonly known as Ashmole 782, she
soon realizes that the book has a spell cast upon it. This poses a problem for
Diana who tries not to use magic to further her research. The reason for this
is that her parents, who were both witches, were killed on a trip to Africa, so
Diana would rather have nothing to do with magic at all.But the book proves too tempting for Diana
and she breaks the spell, she quickly realizes that the book is a palimpsest,
or a manuscript within a manuscript.But
this was not just any palimpsest, where the parchment had been reused and the
old writing was showing through.Diana
can only catch glimpses of what the manuscript is hiding.She soon realizes that there is more to this
book than it seems, and that each type of creature is desperate to get a hold
of this manuscript which has been “lost” for 150 years. Diana soon realizes that
there are more witches, vampires, and daemons in Oxford than she thought
possible.

We follow Diana’s and Mathew’s
budding romance which is of course has many twists and turns.Diana also starts to experience some witch
talents that she had been unaware of, such as witch water and witch wind.These talents are extremely rare, so Matthew,
who is a geneticist, tests her DNA and finds out that, she has a marker for
almost every single witch talent.Most
witches at the most only have one or two.Both of Diana’s parents were very powerful witches and obviously passed
down most of their talents.Diana has
always been a kind of mystery to the rest of her kind because she doesn’t
practice her craft; she would rather rely on just her intellect to produce her
scholarly work.As her and Matthew’s
relationship get quite serious the other creatures get quite agitated and so
far as to spy on her and break into her apartment.At this point Matthew is actually afraid of
what the witches and daemons might do to Diana he brings her to his “mother” in
France.

I really enjoyed this book and have
started the second book.There were a
few aspects that bothered me, such as Diana’s lack of awareness as to how much she
actually uses magic her life and her approach to her and Matthew’s
relationship.I had no problem getting
right into the book but many other group members said that it took a bit for
them to get into the story.